AMA: Unbabel Former VP of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Competitive Positioning

Here are some ways I've tackled this with my teams: 1. It is important to establish a cadence for your competitive research. How often is actually achievable based on your resources/bandwidth? Do you have a dedicated CI person on the team or is your team smaller where this is part of your overall scope? and how often is good enough? This will vary based on your internal structure and org needs. 2. Do some passive research. Use Alerts and RSS feeds. Sign up for competitors’ marketing newsletters or blog content, etc. This enables you to keep tabs on an ongoing basis, without a lot of regular effort. 3. There are many tools out there that also track changes on things like website changes, news updates, etc. The two I am aware of are Crayon, SEMRush, and Klue, and I have personally used Klue! 4. Dedicate an hour or two every week (I prefer Friday afternoons) and block that on your calendar to just do research!

As with any other sales content, find out how your specific sales team likes to consume content. This will give you an idea of the format, as well as the channels in which to share this information. This will also depend on your company culture. In my personal experience it's important to do the following: * Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. * Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. * Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific). This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish internally * There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for information * Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read * It's not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more interactive conversation and help answer specific questions.

I like to keep these simple, and just use a single value proposition slide. Especially when it’s for an executive team. Here are the basic things to include: * Who is our audience? (customer segment) * What challenges do they face? (what is the need and the cost of not meeting that need?) * What is our solution? (a description of your offering) * How do we solve their problem? (Solution/benefit statement) * What makes us unique? (Your top 3-5 core differentiators) Alternatively, if you want something more creative/involved, I recommend also creating a brand narrative/brand anthem doc - a story that follows a “hero's journey” format.

This really depends on the actual goal of a CI program, but here are a few ideas: For the sales team: * Competitive win rates (pre and post intel) * Sales confidence on competitive pitching (This is something you can measure using surveys at a regular cadence like quarterly) For the product team: * Feature parity if that is what you are focused on * Competitive differentiation - if you really need a metric you can create a percentage scale and see how that changes over time For the marketing team * If you have competitive materials or webpages - measure engagement and conversions

I did an AMA a while ago that went into detail on how to build differentiated messaging - this talks about a 7-step process that I have created and adapted for use over time with different companies I have worked for. You can read more about it here: https://sharebird.com/ama/surveymonkey-director-of-product-marketing-sarah-din-on-messaging

1. Get your executive team aligned and bought in first - because you need them to champion this to the rest of the org, and to set the precedence by using your messaging regularly as they talk about the company. 2. When you create new messaging - make sure you do internal activation in the form of training or some sort of a rollout. Make it fun, gamify it and do it over time so it sticks. 3. Create Quizzes, give away prizes. 4. Create content in different formats - docs, videos, intranet content, printed materials, etc. 5. Also make sure it’s easy to find documentation, Centralize it and share it over and over again. 6. Get HR involved and make sure it's part of onboarding for all new employees. There is, unfortunately, no shortcut to this. It will simply take some time, especially if this is a complete new overhaul of your messaging

I honestly customize the framework for each company I work for, but over the year’s I've built my own since I never found anything existing that I really loved. If you want an example, message me and I can share an example. Competitive positioning is always part of the initial messaging development work, and then I do always have a section in my messaging docs on competitors to talk about competitors at a glance (and unique differentiators), which then links to more detailed competitive intel docs.

Depends on how competitive your market is. You can create a list of competitors and create segments based on different variables that are important for your product or business. For instance direct competitors vs indirect competitors, Or competitors by vertical, or competitors by use case, etc. Secondly, If you have a LOT of competitors, I would do a prioritization exercise to identify the top 3-5 that you track more regularly vs others that you passively track, as needed. For instance, prioritize the ones that come up during sales deals most often! Or if this competitive intel is to drive your product roadmap, prioritize the ones that you are trying to differentiate from. Lastly, don’t forget the “status quo” competitors - for instance at Unbabel, one of the things we compete with is companies hiring customer support agents that speak multiple languages - it is also important to also build messaging around that!

I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about. (Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?) I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2 rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials to gather what statements they use to answer each of those. This helps to look at your competitors’ positioning in a more uniform way. Then add a column for your company and your own statements - and in the simplest, easiest way this should give you an idea of how you differentiate at a high level. Enabling sales on competitive intel is a whole topic on its own, but here are a few tips on how to do it effectively: * Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. * Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. * Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific). This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish internally * There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for information * Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read * It’s not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more interactive conversation and help answer specific questions. And here are few tips on how to test if it's resonating with your buyers * Run test campaigns against your control messaging across different marketing channels to see how it performs (Paid, Social, Email, website A/B tests, Sales pitches, etc.) * Talk to your sales team, run pilots, listen to gong calls, sit in on sales calls, etc. * Test in-product messaging * Run quantitative studies, interviews, focus groups, etc * Test it with analysts.

That is a great question! I like to have both. The core messaging should be for your overall company and product - this is the foundational messaging for how to talk about your product (and perhaps even different parts of your product depending on product complexity) Then as you develop and launch new features, your launch GTM plan should also have launch-specific messaging that you align your entire GTM team around. As you develop new messaging for each launch, make sure you go back and either interlink your core messaging doc to the different feature messaging guides OR add new sections in your core doc that link to those details, so over time you can build a messaging bible that is comprehensive. With smaller teams, the only way to do this is to first take some time to build the core foundational messaging and get it right, so that when new launches you are not having to redo that every time and you can just focus on what you are actually launching.

Most people talk about positioning and messaging under the same breath and interchangeably, but in fact, these are two very different things that have inter-dependencies. Positioning is contextual. It’s simply about your ownable market position. The goal is to answer “how are you unique?” And “how do you want to be perceived in the market?” In practice, this is your core value proposition - and you can find a plethora of templates online for this. Messaging on the other hand is about how you communicate that position to the various audiences you serve (because it really should be tailored to each audience). It's the actual verbiage, language, and tone that you create for your brand which drives your entire content strategy. In order to have a messaging framework, you need to have a solid positioning statement/value proposition. And positioning is useless without having an execution plan that includes messaging - that's how they depend on each other. In order to get buy-in, focus on the positioning first before you start working on your messaging framework.